Ash Wednesday
Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews.
‘You are dust, and to dust you shall return.’
These words tell us that we are mortal. That we will die. They’re words that come first not from the liturgy of Ash Wednesday, but from the Bible, from the very first book, from the beginning of humanity’s story with God.
‘You are dust, and to dust you shall return’. These are the words God speaks to Adam just before he is expelled from Eden. The serpent had convinced Adam and Eve that they wouldn’t die if they ate of the forbidden fruit, despite God’s warning. And they don’t die immediately. But die they will, out of the garden, away from God.
Adam, here, stands for us all. His predicament is ours: we were not made for death, but for life with God. But through sin, through our turning away from God and rejection of his life, death has claimed us. We all live outside paradise now.
And on Ash Wednesday we are marked with the uncomfortable truth of that curse. ‘You are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ When the ash is traced on my head it marks me out as a sinner, as someone who, like Adam, turns away from God and rejects his life. It tells me I live under the dominion of death.
But then we dare to pray ‘have mercy upon me, O Lord, according to your loving-kindness; in your great compassion blot out my offences’ (this is what the choir will sing as we’re ashed: Allegri’s unparalleled setting of Psalm 51). At the start of Lent we acknowledge our sin and cry out to God for mercy, for forgiveness. And that is possible only because of the loving-kindness of God.
Because God’s love precedes our sin. We don’t come before God today with all our penitential liturgy because God’s heart is moved by the depth or quality of our confession. The depth and quality of our confession is made possible by the loving mercy of God. We can easily get stuck in the mindset that Lent is about our journey towards God: that somehow we can reach him or earn his love by our spiritual practices, our fasting, our efforts at love of him and neighbour, as bit by bit we haul ourselves up from the depths towards the divine light. The truth is entirely the opposite: we embark on Lent because God has already journeyed towards us.
God looks on our predicament, our estrangement from him, our captivity to death. And God enters into it. ‘He made him to be sin who knew no sin’, says St Paul in our first reading. It’s an obscure phrase but what it means is that the sinless Son of God enters into the place our sin puts us: a place of separation from God, a place of death. And he does this ‘so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.’ In other words, God hasn’t given up on us. God still wants us to share in his life, will love us to death and beyond, will bring us to the place where Jesus is.
That’s why the cross stands at the far end of Lent. That’s where sin puts us, so it’s where Jesus goes. Jesus is God’s answer to the Psalmist’s prayer.
We see this enacted in today’s Gospel reading. Adultery is against the Jewish Law: it’s right there, clear as can be, in the sixth commandment. The woman in the story is horribly used by the religious men to try to trap Jesus. They are less concerned with the adultery than they are with getting Jesus to say something that will condemn him. But they are on solid ground, in terms of the law, in condemning her for the sin. And they’re ready to stone her: the wages of sin is death, and the heft of the rocks in their hands matches the weight of their self-righteousness.
The woman is isolated in her shame, alone in her guilt, cowering in her sin before those who have the power of life and death over her. The Psalmist’s words are true: ‘I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me’. Dare she ask for mercy? She’s silent. And yet mercy looks at her, speaks to her, frees her.
‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her,’ says Jesus. He is the ‘one who knew no sin’, the only one there qualified to pass judgement on her. And he chooses mercy. ‘Neither do I condemn you’, he tells her. ‘Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.’
His mercy is offered before she asks for it. His mercy is offered when, according to the law, she has no right to expect it. She waits for the condemnation she expects to be pronounced, but is given instead a new future: one lived in response to the mercy she’s received, in which sin and shame do not define her.
This is Lent’s invitation, inscribed in ash: to discover the mercy of God flowing into the places of our sin and shame, making a way for life so he can claim us from death, uprooting old habits of thinking or speaking or acting, leading us from sin to righteousness.
The ash tells us one truth: that we are sinners, and that we live in death’s shadows. But the form the ash takes tells us another, prior truth: that while we were sinners, Christ died for us. We are dust, but we are dust that is loved and redeemed and raised to life with Jesus. Beyond the ash, beyond the grave, the tomb stands open.